The Magnificent 07

Too West

Using the film The Magnificent Seven as the jumping-off point for this year's Best of OC was a natural. It's 2007, and we're doing a Western theme. Get Phil Noto to do the cover and section openers in a supercool cowboys-and-girls-with-a-modern-twist style, get Kyle T. Webster to do some zany, conceptual spot illustrations based on the items themselves, and we're there. Boom. Simple.

Now, it is possible to take these Best Of themes too far, force things. Like if, for instance, somebody thought it might be a good idea to do the entire introduction to this issue in some kind of fake-ass cowboy dialect. Why, if some ding-dangled, consarn hornswoggler wuz ta start fixin' ta git ready ta do sumthin that goldurn loco, why, dagnabit, we'd chap his . . . er, we'd politely inform that person that he or she was pushing the conceit a bit too hard.

So, when it came to our short profiles of eight local movers and shakers (two of them are a couple—see, we can be flexible on this whole theme deal!), we merely asked them to give us their seven Favorite Things about living in the Greater Orange County Metropolitan Area. No themey cowboy crap. Some of their responses will be familiar to our readers, but there should be a surprise or two in there, ah ga-rawn-tee. (Wait, was that too Cajun? Shit! We'll stop now. Promise.)

That's what Best of OC is supposed to be about, after all: An annual celebration of all things OC (and a few things LBC), in which our staff and contributors heap praise upon deserving people, places, events, trends, dishes—some of which are already your Favorite Things, others you'll want to go check out for yourselves for the first time after reading this paper.

We've broken our winners down into seven categories with cutesy cowboyish names (don't worry about those—it'll be obvious what each category is about), and even invited your participation through our Readers' Poll, the winners of which are noted both at the beginning of each section and with the item describing the winner our writers selected.